Pet Holiday Club: Privacy Policy

Policy version: 0.1

Hi, welcome to Pet Holiday Club. This page explains what happens to your information (and your pet's paperwork) when you use our AI document-check tool, join our waitlist, or just browse the site.

We're Pet Holiday Club Limited, a UK company registered at 20 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU. In legal terms we're the "controller" of the personal data we collect, that just means we're the ones who decide how it's used, and we're accountable if we get it wrong.

We're bound by UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018). Because a lot of our customers are in the EU, EU data protection law (the EU GDPR) applies to those customers too. Almost everything below works the same way under both, we've flagged the handful of places where UK and EU law currently pull in different directions, because that difference actually matters for how our AI verdict works.

This is a service for adults, and we don't knowingly collect personal data directly from anyone under 16, see 'Children' below for how that works in practice.

What this covers

This policy covers your use of petholidayclub.com, our document-check tool, our subscription, and the Pet Holiday Club pages we run on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, at least the parts we actually control. Those platforms run on their own privacy policies too, which sit alongside ours.

What we collect

It depends on how you use Pet Holiday Club. Here's the full list:

• Your contact and account details, your name and email, plus anything else you share when you join our waitlist or get in touch.
• Your pet's travel documents, photos or scans you upload to check their paperwork: rabies certificates, microchip records, health certificates, titre test results, parasite treatment records. These almost always show your pet's microchip number, and often your own name, address and signature, and your vet's details too.
• Your route, wherever you tell us you're travelling to and from.
• Billing details, if you subscribe, your payment information. We don't hold your full card number ourselves; that goes to our payment provider Stripe.
• Anything you send us, emails, contact form messages, social media messages.
• Your Ambassador story, if you apply to our Ambassador Program or share your pet's travel story, whatever you choose to include, photos too.
• The basics on how you use the site, device, browser and usage data, via cookies (more on that below).

We only ask for what a feature actually needs, we can't check your documents without your documents, for instance. Where something's optional, we'll say so at the time.

A quick technical point about your pet's health records

Your pet's vaccination and health documents are about your pet, not you, so they're not "special category" personal data under GDPR, that extra protection is for information about people, not animals. We're not trying to collect sensitive information about you (health, religion, ethnicity, that kind of thing) through this site. Please don't include anything like that in what you upload or send us, beyond what's unavoidably on an official document, your vet's own name, for example.

If you upload something irrelevant or unexpected, our system won't recognise it against the document type it's expecting, so it's treated as invalid and flagged red. You can permanently delete any uploaded document yourself at any time, using the delete option next to it, this removes it from your account and from our backing database.

How we collect it

Mostly directly, when you join the waitlist, upload documents, subscribe, get in touch, or submit an Ambassador story. Some comes in indirectly, through cookies while you browse (see 'Cookies' below).

We don't currently receive any data about you from other sources, for example, page-interaction data that Meta or TikTok might otherwise share with us as page administrator.

Why we use it, and what allows us to

Here's the honest version, purpose by purpose:

• Running your account and our waitlist. Because setting you up is part of the deal, and sometimes just because it's sensible for us to keep things running smoothly.contract necessity; consent for waitlist emails
• Checking your pet's documents and giving you a verdict. This is the core of what we do, so we need your documents to do it. See 'How the AI verdict works' below for exactly how the decision gets made and what safeguards apply.contract necessity
• Having a vet review your verdict. Same basis as above, it's part of delivering the service, and it's also central to keeping the automated side of this fair.contract necessity
• Taking your payment and keeping basic accounting records. We need to bill you, and tax law makes us keep records of that regardless.contract necessity; legal obligation
• Replying when you contact us. Because you asked us something and you deserve an answer.legitimate interests
• Sending marketing, if you've said yes. We'll only email you about new features, countries or offers if you've actively opted in, more in 'Marketing' below.consent
• Understanding how people use the site. Only with your consent via our cookie tool, except for the handful of cookies strictly necessary to make the site work at all.consent
• Keeping things secure and stopping fraud. Protecting you and us.legitimate interests; legal obligation
• Because the law requires it. Responding to a regulator, a court, or a legal obligation, when we have to.legal obligation

If we're relying on our legitimate interests for something, you can ask us for the details of how we weighed that up, just email us.

How the AI verdict works, and your rights around it

Here's what actually happens when you use our document-check tool. An AI system we built ourselves reads whatever you upload, works out which pet and which document type it's looking at, and checks it against the entry rules for your route. That gives you a colour, green, yellow, orange or red, plus an item-by-item breakdown.

But it doesn't stop there: the AI checks your document against a database of compliance rules that our own licensed vets have verified and built, and every verdict comes with a confidence level. Where that confidence level is below 90%, we tell you not to rely on the verdict alone and recommend you speak to one of our pet travel specialists instead. Because a licensed vet stands behind the rules the AI is applying, and because you can always get a real person to look at a low-confidence result, we don't treat this as a decision "based solely on automated processing" under data protection law, but we still want you to understand how it works, and what your rights would be if that changed.

If we ever did start issuing verdicts without a person checking each one, say, for very simple, low-risk routes, here's what would have to be true:

• Under UK law (Articles 22A to 22D of the UK GDPR, in force since 5 February 2026): we'd need a recognised legal reason to do it, documented safeguards, and you'd always be able to ask us to explain the logic, get a human to look at it, and challenge the result.
• Under EU law (Article 22 of the EU GDPR, which is stricter and hasn't changed): we'd generally need your explicit consent or another specific legal basis before doing that for EU-based customers, with equivalent safeguards.

Either way, you can always ask us to explain a verdict, ask for a human to take another look, or challenge a result. Just email support@petholidayclub.com

One more thing, because EU law now requires us to say it plainly: when you use our document-check tool, you're interacting with an artificial intelligence system. The verdict is generated with AI, checked against rules our licensed vets have verified, and a real vet is available to review it if the confidence level is low or you ask for one.

And a reminder that matters more than any of the legal detail above: your verdict is based on what you've uploaded and the published rules for your route, the actual decision at the border is always the destination country's to make, not ours.

Marketing

We'll only email you about new features, countries or offers if you've told us it's okay, for example, by ticking a box when you join the waitlist. If you're already a paying customer, we might also tell you about similar features under a narrow legal exception called the "soft opt-in", unless you've already said no.

You can opt out any time, hit unsubscribe on any marketing email, or just email us at support@petholidayclub.com. Opting out of marketing won't stop us telling you things you actually need to know, like something about your account or a verdict you've asked for, that's not marketing, that's just running the service.

We will never sell your data to anyone else for their own marketing.

Who we share it with

We work with a few outside parties to run Pet Holiday Club:

• the people who host our website and handle payments Stripe, and whoever we use for email GHL crm service, all under contracts that limit what they can do with your data;
• our own lawyers and accountants, who are bound by confidentiality;
• law enforcement, courts or regulators, if we're legally required to hand something over, or genuinely believe we need to;
• a buyer, if we're ever acquired or merge with someone else, we'd anonymise what we can.

We don't sell your data.

Sending data abroad

Because we built our AI system ourselves, most of what happens to your documents stays in the UK. Where we do send data outside the UK or EEA, say, to a hosting or email provider based elsewhere, we'll only do it if the destination country is officially recognised as safe, if we've put a proper legal safeguard in place (like the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum or the EU's Standard Contractual Clauses), or if a specific legal exception applies.

Cookies

We use cookies. Where they're not strictly necessary to make the site work, we'll ask first, and you can change your mind any time via cookie settings.

Your rights

You've got the usual set of rights over your information, and none of them cost anything to use:

• See it. Ask for a copy of what we hold about you.
• Fix it. Tell us if something's wrong and we'll correct it.
• Delete it. Ask us to erase it, in the situations where that applies.
• Restrict it. Ask us to pause using it while we sort out a dispute.
• Take it with you. Get a portable copy of what you gave us, or have us send it to someone else.
• Object. Tell us to stop using your data for marketing, any time, no questions asked, or push back on other uses based on our legitimate interests.
• Understand automated decisions. See 'How the AI verdict works' above.
• Change your mind. Withdraw consent whenever you gave it, without undoing anything that happened before.
• Complain. See below.

To use any of these, email support@petholidayclub.com and tell us which one you're after, plus enough detail for us to identify you.

Keeping your data secure

We take reasonable technical and organisational steps to stop your data being lost, altered, or accessed by anyone who shouldn't see it, and we limit access to people who actually need it. If something does go wrong, we have a process for dealing with it, and we'll tell you and the relevant regulator if we're required to.

How long we keep your data

Here's how long, by type of data:

• account details, for as long as you have an active account, then 12 months afterwards;
• uploaded documents and verdicts, 24 months from the date of the verdict;
• payment records, at least 6 years, to meet UK tax law's minimum for accounting records;
• marketing consent, until you withdraw it, or 12 months of inactivity, whichever comes first;
• correspondence, 24 months from your last message to us.

Children

This is a service for adults, and we don't knowingly collect personal data directly from anyone under 16. We don't have a technical way to verify age, but the pet travel documents our tool checks can only ever name someone aged 16 or over as the pet's owner, UK and EU schemes like the Animal Health Certificate and the Northern Ireland Pet Travel Document set that as the minimum age for a named owner, so a child shouldn't in practice be able to use the service as the person on the documents. If that changes, or if the law requires us to handle parental consent differently, we'll update this policy. If you think a child has given us information directly, email support@petholidayclub.com

How to complain

We'd hope you'd come to us first, support@petholidayclub.com, and we'll do our best to sort it out. If you're in the UK, you can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or call 0303 123 1113. If you're in the EU, you can complain to your own country's data protection authority.

Changes to this policy

We might update this from time to time. If we make a significant change, you shall see it via a notice on the site.

How to contact us

Pet Holiday Club Limited, 20 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU, United Kingdom.

Email: support@petholidayclub.com